BP's Gulf of Mexico oil well to be sealed 'by Sunday'

BP's ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico is expected to be permanently sealed by Sunday.

Adm Thad Allen, in charge of cleaning up the oil spill, has said a relief well, which has taken more than four months to drill, should intersect the damaged well later on Thursday.

A mixture of mud and cement will then be pumped in, permanently sealing it.

On Wednesday, the US said it would require oil firms to plug 3,500 non-producing Gulf of Mexico oil wells.

"We are within a 96-hour window of killing the well," former Coast Guard chief Adm Allen told reporters.

No oil has spilled into the Gulf since a temporary cap was placed on the well in mid-July. Mud and cement were later pushed down through the top of the well, and the cap removed.

The relief well is being drilled 2.5 miles (4km) through dirt and rock beneath the sea floor so that the ruptured well can also be sealed from the bottom, ensuring it never causes a problem again.

On Wednesday, the US government said it also wanted energy firms to dismantle hundreds of unused platforms to prevent potential leaks; some installations have been sitting idle for decades without inspection for leaks.

The new requirements are due to take effect in October.

BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in April, killing 11 people and causing one of the worst ecological disasters in US history, with nearly five million barrels of oil spilling into the Gulf.
'Devastating'

In London on Wednesday, BP's departing boss Tony Hayward told MPs that the oil spill was "devastating" to him.

"I understand why people feel the way they do, and there is little doubt that the inability of BP, and the industry, to intervene to seal the leak... was unacceptable."

But he said it would be wrong to blame only BP.

"No single factor caused the accident, and multiple parties including BP, Halliburton and Transocean, were involved," he told MPs on the Commons Energy Committee.

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BP spreads blame over oil spill

A "sequence of failures involving a number of different parties" was to blame for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP says.

An investigation carried out by BP said it was responsible in part for the disaster, but it also blamed two other companies working on the well.

However both firms criticised the report.

BP faces billions of dollars worth of legal claims for compensation over the spill, the worst in recent US history.

An estimated 4.9m barrels of oil leaked into the Gulf after the blast.

The well was capped on 15 July, and an operation to permanently seal it is due to take place in the next few weeks.

In the 193-page internal report released on its website, BP said that decisions made by "multiple companies and work teams" contributed to the accident, which it said arose from "a complex and interlinked series of mechanical failures, human judgements, engineering design, operational implementation and team interfaces".

BP was leasing the Deepwater Horizon rig from Transocean, and its cement contractor was Halliburton. The BP report was critical of the processes and actions of teams from both firms.

However, in a statement issued after the report, Transocean dismissed BP's criticism, calling the company's own well design "fatally flawed".

"In both its design and construction, BP made a series of cost-saving decisions that increased risk - in some cases, severely," the Associated Press reported Transocean as saying.

Halliburton also criticised the BP report, saying that it had "a number of substantial omissions and inaccuracies".

"Halliburton remains confident that all the work it performed with respect to the Macondo well was completed in accordance with BP's specifications," Cathy Mann, Halliburn's director of corporate affairs, said in a statement.

'Bad cement'

The report, conducted by BP's head of safety, Mark Bly, highlighted eight key failures that, in combination, led to the explosion.

BP said that both BP and Transocean staff incorrectly interpreted a safety test which should have flagged up risks of a blowout.


"Over a 40-minute period, the Transocean rig crew failed to recognise and act on the influx of hydrocarbons into the well" which eventually caused the explosion.

BP criticised the cementing of the well - carried out by Halliburton - and repeated previous criticism of the blowout preventer.

Among the other findings, the report said:

    * There were "no indications" that Transocean had tested intervention systems at the surface, "as was

required by Transocean policy", before they were deployed on the well
    * "Improved engineering rigour, cement testing and communication of risk" by Halliburton could have identified flaws in cement design and testing, quality assurance and risk assessment
    * A Transocean rig crew and a team described as "mudloggers" working for Halliburton Sperry Sun may have been distracted by what are described as "end-of-well activities" and, as a result, important monitoring was not carried out for more than seven hours
    * Crew may have had more time to respond before the explosion if they had diverted escaping fluids overboard.

"To put it simply, there was a bad cement job and a failure of the shoe track barrier at the bottom of the well, which let hydrocarbons from the reservoir into the production casing," said outgoing chief executive Tony Hayward.

The Deepwater Horizon explosion according to BP

                           
                                                                                   
    *   19 April - 'Bad' cement pumped down casing to stop gas and oil leaking into welbore
    * 20 April - Gas and oil leak through shoe track barrier and float collar
    * 20 April - Tests carried out on the rig incorrectly suggest pressure is at a safe level
    * The crew do not recognise there is a major problem or act to control it until the hydrocarbons are flowing
   rapidly up the riser
    * The crew close the blowout preventer and diverter, routing oil and gas to the mud gas separator (MGS) system rather than diverting it overboard
    * The MGS is overwhelmed by the force of oil and gas which leaks into the rig's ventilation system
    * The heating, ventilation and air conditioning system is thought to have sent a gas-rich mixture into the engine rooms
    * 2149 local time There are two explosions, killing 11 men
    * April 21 - 22 - The BOP designed to work automatically failed to seal the well as control pods and cutter (blind sheer ram) were not working

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BP

BP's got a mole working on its cleanup team. The company might be able to keep the press from getting to oiled-up Elmer's Island Wildlife Refuge, but as long as people have cell phones, it's going to have a hell of a time keeping Elmer's Island from getting to the press.

Late Wednesday night I talked to a spill worker involved in the efforts to clean up South Louisiana's barrier islands. Let's call him Elmer, because we spoke under condition of strict anonymity. Though he hasn't signed one of the BP contracts that bars workers from communicating with reporters, he has been told "500 times" that if he talks, he's fired. He certainly didn't contact me because his politics are similar to mine. "George Bush was too liberal for me," he explained. But: "I like the media. The country couldn't run without it, and it's important to have media from both the left and right."

He also called because on Tuesday BP told me (again) that I couldn't go to Elmer's Island with a producer from PBS's Need to Know because the road to it "needed more gravel." This was a lie: "Everyone else," Elmer said, "is driving on that road"—about 20 cars and vans going up and down a day, and the re-graveling had happened the day before we arrived. Since BP was making my job so much harder, Elmer wanted to make it a little easier.

BP's got good reason for wanting to keep insiders like Elmer away from reporters. Elmer says that last Thursday, when the Coast Guard was announcing that the top kill seemed to be working, the cleanup supervisors on Grand Isle had already been informed it was a failure—which, of course, was not publicly announced until several days later.

And as more and more oil continues to deluge Louisiana shores, the cleanup efforts are slowing down. Workers have spent inordinate amounts of time sitting around waiting to be utilized, a frustration echoed by other workers who talked to friends of mine who were on a day trip to the beach. The workers are also upset because last Friday, many of them weren't paid as scheduled. According to Elmer, the mostly white foremen (whom he welcomed me to picture as stereotypical gristly union-boss types) told their mostly black subordinates that they didn't want to hear any bitching about it and that if they had a problem they could go home. Such unpleasant work in such an unpleasant environment and for such low pay (as little as $10 an hour) is, not surprisingly, leading to superhigh attrition. Last week, there were 110 workers on Elmer's Island. Right now, there are only 60 cleaning up the 1,700-acre home to fish, shrimp, and crab nurseries. (I called ES&H, the subcontractor running the cleanup show, for comment, but it only has one person who talks to the media, and that person was not available today.)

Elmer's Island was already in bad shape when I was there two weeks ago, but the fire chief of nearby Grand Isle told me yesterday that a massive slick of concentrated oil had been seen just offshore. This morning, Elmer emailed me an update about the forbidden island. "I thought you might be interested to know," he wrote, "there's a LOT more oil out on the beach now."

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BP

Oil continues to flow as technicians attempt a repair at the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil leak in the Gulf of
A live video feed provided by BP showed the inverted, funnel-like cap being attached to the well's fractured riser pipe in near-freezing waters, nearly a mile below the surface. If the operation is successful, BP will then siphon the oil to a ship on the surface.
Oil and gas continued to spew out with great force from the riser during the operation, complicating efforts to determine whether the cap was in fact a good fit.


But even if it does fit well, and stay in place, engineers have already acknowledged that the cap will not be a fix-all, and some of the crude will still spew out even if it is successfully placed over the gusher.
BP earlier managed to slice off the fractured well pipe with a pair of giant shears, but the cut was jagged and officials had to resort to a looser-fitting cap.
The British energy giant's chief executive, Tony Hayward, has warned it could take about a day after the cap is put in place to know if it is managing to contain the worst of the spill, amid warnings that, with the broken pipe cut off, the oil flow would initially increase by up to 20 per cent.
The firm has repeatedly tried - and failed - to contain the disastrous leak since an April 20 explosion tore through the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig just off the Louisiana coast.
Between 22 million and nearly 36 million gallons of crude have already spewed into Gulf waters, threatening vulnerable coastal wetlands, wildlife and livelihoods, according to US government estimates.
After the cap, the next chance to halt the flow would not come until mid-August, when relief wells are completed.

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BP Stock

Firm's stock sale nearly twice as large as any other institution; Represented 44 percent of total BP investment

The brokerage firm that's faced the most scrutiny from regulators in the past year over the shorting of mortgage related securities seems to have had good timing when it came to something else: the stock of British oil giant BP.

According to regulatory filings, RawStory.com has found that Goldman Sachs sold 4,680,822 shares of BP in the first quarter of 2010. Goldman's sales were the largest of any firm during that time. Goldman would have pocketed slightly more than $266 million if their holdings were sold at the average price of BP's stock during the quarter.

If Goldman had sold these shares today, their investment would have lost 36 percent its value, or $96 million. The share sales represented 44 percent of Goldman's holdings -- meaning that Goldman's remaining holdings have still lost tens of millions in value.

The sale and its size itself isn't unusual for a large asset management firm. Wall Street brokerages routinely buy and sell huge blocks of shares for themselves and their clients. In light of a recent SEC lawsuit arguing that Goldman kept information about a product they sold from their clients, however, the stock sale may raise fresh concern among Goldman's critics. Goldman is also a frequent target of liberals and journalists, including Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, who famously dubbed the firm a "vampire squid."

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Rosie Huntington Whitely

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley has indeed been cast as Megan Fox’s replacement in Michael Bay’s Transformers 3. The Victoria’s Secret model has no acting experience — not that much emoting will be required from her. The robots will provide all the required acting in the action/sci-fi flick.
Megan Fox and Bay had an ugly public rift following Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. A few weeks ago, Paramount announced it wasn’t renewing Fox’s contract. The actress then retorted that she was the one who decided to quit the series because she was no longer willing to work with Bay. Fox will next be seen opposite Josh Brolin in Jonah Hex.
Huntington-Whiteley, who had previously worked with Bay on the Victoria’s Secret ad "A Thousand Fantasies," will play Shia LaBeouf’s romantic interest in this third installment of the Transformers franchise, reviled by critics, worshiped by a certain (large) segment of the filmgoing public.
Others in the Transformers 3 cast are Josh Duhamel, Ken Jeong, Patrick Dempsey, Alan Tudyk, John Turturro, Peter Cullen, Kevin Dunn, Tyrese Gibson, Julie White, and Oscar winner Frances McDormand and Oscar nominee John Malkovich, who I believe are supposed to lend a patina of respectability to the braindead proceedings. Transformers 3, which is currently in production in the Los Angeles area, should come out July 1, 2011

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